Back-spelling
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An unetymological, often hypercorrect, spelling of a word created by analogy with other words which (usually through loss of a sound or its phonetic merger with other sounds) have become similar to it.
"Modern English numb is a back-spelling, because this word never had a /b/ in it. The back-spelling is based on words such as lamb, which had once ended in /b/, but where this sound was lost and the letter b became silent."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"Modern English numb is a back-spelling, because this word never had a /b/ in it. The back-spelling is based on words such as lamb, which had once ended in /b/, but where this sound was lost and the letter b became silent."
Etymology
From back + spelling.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.